Wednesday, 27 November 2013

Sometimes it only takes a few
frames to realise that you’re in for a treat. This was the case for me with
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 masterpiece The
Passion of Joan of Arc. It is however a film that I’d put off watching for
a long time. Despite my interest in silent cinema and all the great things I’d read
and heard, there was something about what little I knew of the film that put me
off. Perhaps it was the subject matter (more on that later) or the idea that it
would be a depressing and/or dull watch but either way it took a good five
years from my first whiff of the film to actually sitting down to watch it.
What a silly boy I was for those five years. Like many other renowned films
that I’d put off viewing it is of course a superb movie that features some of
the best acting, editing and camera placement I’ve ever seen.

The film tells of the
imprisonment, trial and (spoiler) execution of Joan of Arc (Noah’s wife) who
claimed divine guidance and lead France to several important military victories
during the Hundred Year’s War before being captured by the English and tried
for heresy, all by the age of nineteen. The film draws on the five hundred year
old transcripts of the trial and indeed original documents form the basis of the
script.

Wednesday, 22 May 2013

Lars von Trier’s The Idiots is my first encounter with a
Dogme 95 film. Dogme 95 was an avant-garde filmmaking movement, begun in 1995
that saw a group of Danish directors release a manifesto of rules by which
their films would be produced. The basis of the rules were to strip filmmaking back
to its traditional values of story, acting and theme and forbade the likes of
artificial lighting, music, additional props and special effects and had
specific rules based around how and where a film was shot. The minimalist and
realist films which were created saw their director go uncredited and often
their cast and crew unpaid. The Idiots
was von Trier’s first Dogme film and the second overall.

Perhaps somewhat predictably for
Lars von Trier, The Idiots is a film
that was marred in controversy. The controversy came from two aspects of the
film. The first was the plot which revolves around a group of anti-bourgeois
Danes who sometimes pretend to have mental disabilities in public. They refer
to this as ‘spassing’ and are often both convincing and cruel in their depictions.
The second controversial aspect of the movie is the graphic sex and nudity. For
a director whose next film is to be called Nymphomaniac,
this might not be surprising but The
Idiots contains scenes of both male arousal and full vaginal intercourse, the
likes of which I’ve never seen in a narrative film.

Monday, 25 February 2013

In Eighteenth Century Denmark a new Queen (Alicia Vikander)
arrives from her native England
to meet her new King, Christian VII (Mikkel Følsgaard) for the first time. The
King instantly fails to live up to his reputation and the Queen is shunned by
him and infuriated by his temperament and apparent madness. What’s worse is
that Denmark’s outdated
censorship bans many of her favourite Enlightenment era books which are
returned to England.
In a small Danish colony in Germany,
two ex Court favourites persuade a local Doctor to apply to be the King’s
physician in the hope that they will once again gain favour with the Court. The
Doctor (Mads Mikkelsen) is an instant hit with the King but with few others.
The Queen slowly learns of their like-mindedness and they begin a slow seizure
of power from the lame duck Monarch as well as embarking on a risky sexual
affair.

It always annoys me when I miss a critically successful
overseas film at the cinema but I simply couldn’t find anywhere showing A Royal Affair on its theatrical
release. The film has since been Oscar Nominated and just the other day won a
couple of converted Kermode Awards so I was thrilled when my online DVD rental
service sent me the film. A Royal Affair
is pretty much all I was expecting of it. It’s a lavish and pretty costume
drama with a political heart and save for a run time I would happily shorten, I
really enjoyed it.